Entries tagged with game of thrones

Title of post because The Wise Man's Fear has all the faults of The Name of the Wind plus some fun new ones, like random ableism against a character who exhibits autism-like behavior, and taking a break from the very little happening to go on a tangent that leads to a tangent that leads to another tangent that appears to be leading to yet another tangent, only the third of which so far has contributed to the protagonist's ultimate goal. Is this how people felt when reading Tristram Shandy? On the bright side… canon bisexual background character?

Actually, my best (desperate) theory is that the whole story is a metacommentary on the construction of heroism and villainy and the nature of myth, from the points of view of both the heroes and the people who stretch and retell the stories that spring up around them. There is a lot of storytelling within storytelling and discussion of myth, from Kvothe deflating his own reputation to the revelation that fairytale figures do exist and have been destroying written and oral records about themselves. Still, 3,000 pages of self-congratulation and seeming aimlessness is a long way to go to explore this theme.

Yesterday I looked at the position of my bookmark and wondered why I was making such slow progress, only to remember that I've actually read 600 pages this week; it's just that there are still 400 left.

Before these two hardcover bricks, I read the equally hefty and aptly titled Leviathan Wakes, the first book the TV series The Expanse was based on. There was one striking moment toward the end in a part of the narrative the show hasn't covered yet, but overall this was an example of the adaptation being better on multiple fronts. I did gain a deeper understanding of the Belter creole and appreciated the explanation for why Alex Kamal's Martian drawl sounds so fake. I enjoyed assessing the changes the showrunners made. Mostly, though, the book was much duller than the show, its prose clunky and obvious and its depiction of women laughable. Have this excerpt from a Goodreads review:

Here is a brief list of how women are portrayed in this book:

1) Trapped in a box.2) Sleeping with her boss.3) Dead.

WATCHING

Game of Thrones. So far so fine as it wobbles off without its training wheels.

Scattershot movies and TV episodes for book trailer vid, which is coming along well.

Allow me a moment to flail at you over the unexpected delight of Horror Express, a 1973 B-movie about a monster-alien on a train that friend M. and I saw in a diner last month. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing did their usual thing, and then Telly Savalas showed up looking like the lovechild of Yul Brynner and Tom Hardy and managed to upstage Lee & Cushing in his only two scenes. IDEK what he was doing, but it was hilarious.

Here is his second and most wonderful appearance. Maybe you have to watch a scene or two before to fully appreciate the WTFness, because until that point, we were in a normal monster movie—and then there was a Queens-accented Russian general, vodka gargling, and whipping.

"Everybody's under arrest!"

VIDDING

The aforementioned book trailer. It is going to be finished by June 10 for a Vividcon deadline, come hell or high water. *determined face*

After a fun start followed by some fumbling, the Auction vid for jetpack_monkey is back on track; looks like it won't be a scramble at the last minute to polish things up for the June 17 deadline.

Have been working with elipie on the playlist for our kink-themed vid show for Vividcon. We're at the point now of contacting vidders, which is fun, but the fun is dampened by having to ask people to encode their files in a specific way for VVC. Maybe not a problem for some, but a headache for others, especially for people whose vids are older, who haven't made many vids and/or who are outside our part of vidding fandom. I'm trying to make things as painless as possible and look forward to a day when conversions aren't necessary.

Want to write more and vid more but either no time or no oomph. May was work, work, focused on work, so much work to do at work, trying to keep things confined to work hours, then movies and TV and sleep the rest of the time. June should be better. It's starting to feel like summer. Friend L. and I went kayaking on the Charles River on Saturday, and I swam last night at the local Y. Water is nice.

WRITING

Nada, but would like to get back to a couple of Inkheart stories in progress and maybe a Mary Sue thing. Have a half-formed dream of taking a few days off in June or July and bringing the laptop somewhere retreat-y.

Books: Finished the fourth Steerswoman novel: excellent, although didn't know the series was incomplete. Alas. Will try to do a separate post about it. Read Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style (thanks, Dee!) as a palate cleanser yesterday/today. TBD what's next. Need to pick something that's good for a long plane trip.

Movies: Been having myself a little Vincent Perez renaissance. ♥ Rewatched The Crow: City of Angels and Queen of the Damned. Then tried Puppylove. It has no reviews on RottenTomatoes, mysteriously. I thought it was ... very French, ha. At first I was amused-disappointed to learn that he didn't play the love interest but instead the main character's father; I guess time has passed since his heartthrob days! But he was quitewinning as the hapless single dad trying to do his best but sometimes making really regrettable choices. Like eventually giving in to a (different) teenage girl's persistent seduction attempts. Mm. Perhaps rewatches of Reine Margot and Indochine in the near future?

TV:Game of Thrones premiere: thought it did a nice job of setting up the season, although it is a little sad to have to wait a week to see Alexander Siddig. One episode left of season one of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, also deserving of its own post. Need to catch up to iggy on Star Trek: The Animated Series.

...It feels like I've been watching more, but it's just the heaps of DVDs and YouTube videos I whipped through for this multifandom vid! Speaking of which:

Vids: Must finish Club Vivid vid this weekend, eek. First draft is 3/4 done as we speak.

Fic: n/a but I hope to do some writing while on vacation starting next week.

Just to say that Geek Burlesque was a total hoot. You haven't lived until you've seen a young man strip down to nothing but briefs and a Boba Fett helmet. Or a coy female Cthulhu in a green bodysuit and mask lowering her bloomers to reveal the tentacles peeking out of her bikini bottom.

Also ran: a brilliant, joyous Robin; Catwoman with a whip, subduing and teasing Commissioner Gordon; Captain Hammer dancing to "Can't Touch This"; Spike singing the "Rest in Peace" song from the Buffy musical and then doing a striptease with his leather duster and red shirt, etc.; the Power Rangers defeating a monster with the strength of skin-baring, and also gymnastics. Oh, and a routine involving the cubes from Portal. Plus two (I think) "regular" burlesque acts with fantastic performers, one a doll/puppet and her puppeteer, and the other breakfast food-themed.

All hosted by a "George R. R. Martin" clearly inspired by the South Park parody. (One of the many floppy wiener jokes involved a broken microphone stand. During the raffle, when he was having trouble getting a ticket out of the Tardis-shaped container, he said, "Winner is coming.")

*Oh! And Keisha Castle-Hughes as a Sand Snake!**Oh, no, except Alex Kurtzman/Roberto Orci were announced as producers. I'll try not to let that dampen my excitement until a director and writer are chosen.

In related news, I was looking up my undergrad thesis advisor to see if he's still teaching at the university and found a page for him on ratemyprofessors.com. He's got one chili pepper, and a student reviewer said, "He looks like Theon Greyjoy from Game of Thrones!" Made me laugh. It's sort of true, and the prof is not unappealing; it's just that I wouldn't say Theon is good-looking. (I have a memory that the prof and I used to talk about how he [prof] looked like Eric Stoltz.)

So I added all my vids on the AO3 to a series, right, because you can't yet filter by media type? This means that on the landing page for my username, all the fandoms and all the characters and all the tags for all my vids appear in a giant list as though they were a single vid. This makes for an entertaining read.

I pulled out a selection of the tags, because it's fun to imagine just what kind of work (vid or fic or otherwise) could include all of these things:

Reading: Best American Magazine Writing 2013, on a break from A Feast of Crows (fourth Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones book). A much more engaging collection than the previous year's, IMO.

Watching:

- Went to catch up on the last third or so of this season of The Vampire Diaries only to discover that it's been so long, they're not all available online; read episode synopses for the missing ones and am continuing on. Am mostly apathetic at this point. I long ago lost track of why Elena and Stefan can or can't be together, and very little that's going on with any plotline or character/relationship is interesting, especially with all the "no homo" they're insisting on with Damon and Enzo, not to mention the theft of yet more ideas from BtVS/Angel etc., down to Romani stereotypes. However, most of the times I've thought things like this in the past, the show has come back with a get-you-right-in-the-heart moment. So I am waiting.

- Game of Thrones. I am so very much anticipating the next episode, because [spoiler], which will cause [emotion]. Overall, though, this season has been poorly paced. A lot of tiny piece adjustments on the game board, with all the good stuff (besides what happened in the second episode) apparently crammed into the end. Seems like a waste of time, given how much of the source story remains, unless they're dragging things out because they don't want to finish before George R.R. Martin does. *shrug* Reading the books in the meantime has certainly taken care of the confusion I felt last season, like that I couldn't tell Stannis or Roose Bolton or Edmure Tully apart (or even name the latter two) or keep Westeros geography straight. This week, I was all, Oh, you want to go to the Eyrie? Take the right rather than the left fork! This has left more mental capacity for enjoying various adaptation choices and considering the anvilicious themes they're drawing out, not only what makes for a good ruler, which the series has been focused on since the beginning, but also things like brotherhood/siblinghood (Tyrion/Jaime, Tyrion/Cersei, Cersei/Jaime, Oberyn/Elia, Sandor/Gregor, Jon/Bran, Lysa/Catelyn, the Night's Watch), and the concept of justice. And I suppose something to do with the pawn-like treatment of people's daughters, re: Myrcella and Sansa and Shireen and Margaery, not to mention Cersei.

- Penny Dreadful. Not sure what to do with this one yet. It's certainly living up to its name with its over-the-top gore, sex, drama and purple prose. Can't tell if that's a deep meta-statement on our continuing attraction to the above, as some reviews would have it, or an excuse to wallow in clichés and lazy writing with top-notch production values. Either way, for now it's enough to delight in the "mashup" of Gothic characters. Never did I expect to see Victor Frankenstein & his creature interact with Mina Murray & her father and a vampire coven alongside Dorian Gray and a variation on Quincey Morris and the requisite cross-obsessed/cursed/crisis of faith/religious vision-type Victorian lady out of an end of days stigmata movie. At least, not outside Mary Shelley's Frankenhole. Come for Timothy Dalton and Reeve Carney; stay for… TBD. So far, in its class of show I prefer NBC Dracula, which plainly revels in its weirdness. But I will not complain about having two whole shows on TV right now in this era and genre.

Remix: Have narrowed it down to a few stories & ideas, but when it comes to putting words in a document, everything goes pfffft.

Vidding: Want to make a thing for con.txt, due end of month. Keep sitting down to clip, then getting bored. I think I might be afraid I can't make it funny... But listen up, self, it's certainly not going to be funny if you can't even draft it.

Watching: Cosmos and Game of Thrones. Keep forgetting Community and The Vampire Diaries exist. Saw season three of Girls. Now plowing through season -- six? whatever the last one was -- of True Blood. The Eric-Willa stuff pleased me, as did the mere fact that they cast Rutger Hauer as the fairy grandfather. Still overall just a bizarre show.

Book reading: Third volume of A Song of Ice and Fire. Might catch up to the show in another couple of weeks.

Fic reading: Have been doing some! After reading the books, I understand better where all the Sansa Stark/Sandor "the Hound" Clegane comes from. Nice subtext there. So I went back to find more of those on AO3. *cough* Being me, went first for the ones with some noncon. Mostly, Joffrey is the villain. Here are some that I bookmarked:

Always Find Me Here by wildsky - Joffrey "punishes" Sansa with the Hound each month she fails to conceive an heir.

The Lioness' Game by madni - Cersei uses the Hound to give Sansa a taste of a real man, then discovers it's less like torment for them than she intended.

The Secret Room by nary - Joffrey has locked Sansa in a kink tower for three years; one day, he brings in a visitor. The end of the first chapter is not as much my cup of tea, but the rest was worth it.

Acts of Generous Cruelty by broomclosetkink - Actually, this one was kind of sweet. Needed tightening up (I skimmed), but I liked the plot of the two castoffs finding love when they were supposed to be humiliated, and what made it a keeper for me was the (quite consensual) losing-of-the-virginity scene at the end.

Some of the scenes ring true, though, like one time when Sansa accepts Clegane's invitation to tie his hands to the headboard and thus feels bold enough to rock on top of him, both still fully clothed, and when she's had enough of that he has to lock himself in the bathroom and she's still naive enough that she doesn't know or wonder why.

...Oh my God, I just looked and it's almost 500,000 words and not finished yet. Hopefully if I make it that far I won't care by the time I get to the not-end.

Oh, hey, Remix is happening. Just signed up! It's been a few years since I participated, and more than a year since I posted a story at all; I'm hoping this will get the ficcy juices flowing. Kept my offers to three fandoms to make things less stressful, especially since I expect to be working on a vid of some kind around the same time. We'll see how it goes with new mods.

Other than that, things here are as usual, except for the wild turkey I saw pecking at the sidewalk a block from Harvard Square this morning. In the voice of Michael Palin, beautiful plumage. Two other passersby were filming it with their phones.

Been exercising almost every day and cooking to take better care of myself, which of course doesn't leave as much room for fannish activity, but still, there has been time this week to start reading A Game of Thrones. About 300 400 pages in now. It's not as overwrought as I'd feared; the mental effort goes to keeping track of all the names -- I can't imagine how much harder that would be without having first seen the show to have faces to pin them to -- rather than ignoring purple prose.

Also I printed this out and hung it up in a simple frame in the kitchen yesterday for laughs whenever I wash dishes.

Oh, and a childhood friend and I are going to see Eddie Izzard live in May!

On a break now between making chicken paprikash and roasted vegetable soup for the week and going to a former classmate's for a dinner party. She and her husband have one of the most beautiful houses I've ever seen, and one of the two best of anyone around my age, yet they just decided to move. I suppose I can't complain, since they'll be a few minutes closer to me. Tonight's challenge was going to be figuring out whether to leave too early to watch Cosmos here or stay too late to watch Cosmos there, but lo, it appears the episodes do appear on fox.com after the fact.

- Reaction to Man of Steel vs. reaction to Star Trek: Into Darkness- Thoughts on last 50 Shades book (before I forget even more of what happened)- Health/food/activity- Emotional resources needed for upcoming NY trip

I owe many people comments and emails and I'm really sorry about that. I will get to them.

For now:

Kink Bingo is ramping up to its next round, which means a wave of thinky kinky posts. Have you seen these in particular?

Voyeurism as identity by gala_apples—a fascinating personal story about coming to understand oneself as a voyeur more than as sexual or asexual.

Tentacle kink in quilting by jelazakazone—not sure if I recced the two quilts jelazakazone posted as part of last year's Bingo, so consider this a double rec: a set of beautiful sea creature quilts and an interesting write-up on the sensory experience of making them.

Have been mostly lying fallow, fic- and vid-wise, for months, but find that I am looking forward once again to this summer's Bingo round; ideas are already stirring. Feels good.

Media:

Watched season three of Game of Thrones and the second half of this season's Doctor Who, am keeping up and enjoying with Defiance, and am ready for another ridiculous installment of True Blood. Taking evening walks around the neighborhood has meant more time to listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour podcasts, which are light and fun, even when I disagree with every host about Star Trek: Into Darkness' value as a Trek property and as an action movie. Making my way slowly through Michael Ondaatje's The Skin of a Lion.

I didn't realize how intense GoT was at a rate of two episodes per night before bed until it started keeping me awake, whoops. Loved sinking into the high production quality, as always. Likewise enjoyed following the themes in each episode. Yet, in the latest example of Obvious Epiphany is Obvious, while watching, I felt the familiar itch for something to happen, already; thought again about how the whole thing is like a giant chess game, all the pieces moving and being moved and getting knocked out and setting others up for destruction, the expert players and the amateurs and the lucky ones; a whole season and everyone moves like an inch on the board; and only then did the brain go ping to the title GAME of Thrones, duh, telling you from the start that it really is all about the machinations. If you're in it for the destination instead of the journey, it's going to be tedious.

Also had a fabulous evening at the ballet a couple of weeks ago when Tropical Storm Andrea blew through. Ballet Across America: companies from Austin, North Carolina and Harlem did a performance each and they were all fantastic. One featured three or four couples in different solid colors dancing in beautiful symmetries to Rachmaninoff below a set of dimming and brightening chandeliers. The second was a gorgeous piece about recovery from the Holocaust, set to Philip Glass, part of a larger award-winning work. The last (sorry, it's really flickery) was an exuberant, athletic, celebratory fusion of urban dance and classical ballet, cheeky and fun, pirouettes and booty shakes, set to James Brown and Aretha Franklin. All received standing ovations, well deserved.